The New York Times ran a story about the USS Nautilus traveling under the polar ice on August 8, 1958, called "Polar Cruise Citations."

This document shows the USS Nautilus's position as it passes over the North Pole under the arctic ice on August 3, 1958. 

Here's our man -- Marvin the Martian. He first appeared in 1948. He is going to blow up the Earth with Uranium PU 36. The PU was pronounced by Mel Blanc as "pew," which sounds like the number 2. Put it altogether and you have, pew! uranium 236, which is close to what will go in a nuclear reactor -- usually U235. But also, plutonium 239 is Pu239. So there you go with the pew factor. And that is what goes in a warhead. No wonder Merry Melodies later changed the uranium to "Illudium PU 36." Talk of uranium was too creepy. Especially when you combine that with talk of blowing up the Earth. The melodies were supposed to be merry, guys! 

Now, consider this: May 26, 1958. Eisenhower made a speech and officially marked the opening of Shippingport Atomic Power Plant in western Pennsylvania. This was our first commercial nuclear power plant. It ran on pellets of thorium dioxide and uranium 233. This was in the papers and on the news programs. This was Chuck Parker's world. It was going nuclear. The family had already gone nuclear, why shouldn't your power company? Also, out west, near San Francisco, California was the Vallecitos Nuclear Center which from October 1957 to December 1963 was cranking out electricity. But as early as 1954 the Navy had a submarine powered by atomic energy: the USS Nautilus. So nuclear power meant, bombs, subs, lights, refrigerators, TVs and the family itself.

This is a 1959 Cadillac. The cars looked like rockets but Chuck Parker's life was all too grounded. For all the exuberance of the car designers, there was a lot of pessimism in many lives as the tail-end of the Eisenhower era. When a few years later Kennedy said America should go to the moon it was heroic because it was desperate. To get to the moon NASA would have to catch up with the Russians and surpass them. And they don't call it rocket science for nothing. If math was not your strong suit, you didn't really believe space would do anything for you personally. You were one small piece in a machine that seemed to be growing beyond recognition. Maybe some day Marvin the Martian would blow up the Earth with his Uranium PU-36 Space Modulator. More on that next time. Gee-wiz, I gotta go!

As far as Chuck Parker is concerned, the definitive Robin Hood was photographed in Technicolor in 1938, starring "Arrow" Flynn. Then one Saturday he happens to see The Roots of Heaven, in which a much older Flynn plays a washed up drunk. It's quite a shock for Chuck. In my research I discovered that this film was shown in a Michigan theater at about the time that I have Chuck and his friend Stevie going to the movies. This was not your standard Saturday afternoon matinee fare. In all likelihood it would have been shown on a Friday night. But I didn't want to have Chuck going to the movies twice. So I collapsed the events. And anyway, we can imagine some sort of mix up or malfunction that made it necessary for the cinema to run this film instead of Hopalong Cassidy. Moreover, this is a movie about hunting and human guilt. The way this tied into Chuck's own hunting experience was too rich for me to ignore. Then when you throw in the very odd scene in which a grown woman is spanked -- given Chuck's current and running trouble with women -- I could hardly pass it up. The fact that the glamorous Robin Hood now is aged and shamefully debauched made this a priceless find. Do I need to come out and say Oedipal? Happy hunting! 

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and The Merry Life of Charles Parker. There is a significant robin or two in Chuck's story.  And Chuck has outlaws in his family tree, perhaps this is one reason he isn't more drawn to the bow and arrows of this merry thief. Chuck does dream of life in the woods and hunting. His pal Stevie Groll tells us that at one point Chuck made a bow out of ash wood. I did slip a sly nod at good old Robin by having Chuck admit to preferring the Green Arrow to Superman as far as superheroes go. 

When I was a kid The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood was one of the first books I read on my own for pleasure. I got one of those little square paperbacks from the grocery store. Robin Hood was already a household name. Not bad for a thousand-year-old legend, eh? Even Daffy Duck takes a turn as the outlaw in Lincoln green (1958). And in this year's election season President Obama's speechwriters came up with a Robin Hood reference. Whether it's robbing the rich to give to the poor or being the greatest marksman to ever take up the longbow, we just can't get Robin Hood out of our collective system. He's merry, he's skillful, he's generous. What's not to love? 

How do you write a convincing kid? How do you write a character who sounds believable set in 1958?

One obvious answer is to see how other writers have handled the situation. What did kids talk like in 1958? I could tell you how they talked when I was a kid. I had Star Wars and Bugs Bunny, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. But what was it like to be a kid in 1958. Mr parents grew up among working class people. So I started looking for literature that dealt with working class people. The Catcher in the Rye was too East Coast. High balls? I don't think so. Farrell is at least in the Midwest. Of course, being an Irish Catholic is important to him. This made me wonder how much I could actually draw from him, but what I did discover is that the youth of Studs Lonigan was in many ways similar to that of a lot of guys I knew. If we weren't doing the things Studs did, we had at least heard of them. This told me that I probably knew more about what it was like to live in 1958 than I had realized.

Now, my hero in The Merry Life of Charles Parker is a twelve-year-old paperboy. I have a twelve-year-old son but I figured the times have changed a lot. I didn't want to rely solely on how my son talks and thinks, and how his friends talk and think. I wanted to get inside a mind that has in some sense vanished. I was greatly encouraged to find in Studs Lonigan a world that was not at all foreign to me. His Chicago seemed much closer to me than the world of Tom Sawyer, for instance.

I can imagine someone who has read my novel reading this blog post and thinking, How is The Merry Life anything like Studs Lonigan? There are a lot of differences, it's true. But without having read Farrell, I might not have ever finished my novel. I might have felt like I had never solved the riddle of the squeaky clean Fifties. It wasn't all Leave It To Beaver. Some of it was beaver, though. Maybe it was all those phallic rockets overhead that made the era so sexually straight-laced. But the sex was there, throbbing, just below the surface. My character Stevie Groll with his collection of magazines helped me to express some of that contradiction.